Bethel Music- Walk in the Promise ft. Jeremy Riddle – YouTube.
Category / Christianty
Bethel Music- Come To Me ft. Jenn Johnson – YouTube
When Old Men Begin to Dream – YouTube
We need not wait for Him. He is waiting for us.
William Graham Scroggie
We need not wait for Him. He is waiting for us. In this place and moment He is offering Himself to us as the source of strength and satisfaction, as well as the place for safety, and if we would but receive Him, fear will be exchanged for trust, doubt for certainty, ineffectiveness for success, defeat for victory, and sadness for joy. We have tried trying and have failed; why not now try trusting? We have wrought in our own strength and have found it to be weakness; why not now take hold of His strength? The faith we once exercised from passion of divine life, let us now exercise for the experience of abounding life; and as Christ met us then, so He meets us now.
W. Graham Scroggie, Land of Life of Rest, London 1950 pp 82-84 [study of the Book of Joshua]
The beginning of love
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.——Thomas Merton
excerpt from “In God’s Underground,” by Richard Wurmbrand
excerpt from In God’s Underground by Richard Wurmbrand
By Richard Wurmbrand
Copyright 1968 The voice of the Martyrs
[Wurmbrand relates this story from his life during World War Two to comfort a fellow prisoner in the Communist gulag they shared; who has betrayed another prisoner out of fear and at the time could not forgive himself]
When Rumania entered the war on Germany’s side, a pogrom began in which many thousands of Jews were killed or deported. At Iasi alone 11,000 were massacred in a day. My wife, who shares my Protestant faith, is also of Jewish origin. We lived in Bucharest, from which the Jews were not deported, but her parents, one of her brothers, three sisters and other relatives who lived in Bocovine were taken to Transmistria, a wild border Province which the Rumanians had captured from Russia. Jews who were not murdered at the end of this journey were left to starve, and there Sabina’s family died.
I had to break this news. She recovered herself and said, “I will not weep. You are entitled to a happy wife, and Mihai to a happy mother, and our Church to a servant with courage.” If she shed tears in private I do not know, but from that day I never saw Sabina weep again.Some time later our landlord, a good Christian, told me sadly of a man who was staying in the house while on leave from the front. “I knew him before the war,” he said, “but he’s changed completely. He has become a brute who likes to boast of how he volunteered to exterminate Jews in Transmistria and killed hundreds with his own hands.”
I was deeply distressed and I decided to pass the night in prayer. To avoid disturbing Sabina, who was unwell and who would have wished to join in my vigil in spite of that, I went upstairs after supper to the landlords flat to pray with him. Lounging in an armchair was a giant of a man whom the landlord introduced as Borila, the killer of Jews from Transmistria. When he rose he was even taller than I, and there seemed to be about him an aura of horror that was like a smell of blood. Soon he was telling us of his adventures in war and of the Jews he had slaughtered.“It is a frightening story,” I said, “but I do not fear for the Jews-God will compensate them for what they have suffered. I ask myself with anguish what will happen to their murderers when they stand before God’s judgement.”
An ugly scene was prevented by the landlord who said we were both guests in his house, and turned the talk into more neutral channels. The murderer proved to be not only a murderer. Nobody is only one thing. He was a pleasant talker, and eventually it came out that he had a great love of music.
He mentioned that while serving in the Ukraine he had been captivated by the songs there. “I wish I could hear them again,” he said.
I knew some of these old songs. I thought to myself, looking at Borila, “the fish has entered my net!”
“If you’d like to hear some of them,” I told him, “come to my flat-I’m no pianist, but I can play a few Ukrainian melodies.”
The landlord, his wife and daughter accompanied us. My wife was in bed. She was used to my playing softly at night and did not wake up. I played the folk-songs, which are live with feeling, and I could see that Borila was deeply moved. I remembered how when King Saul was afflicted by an evil spirit, the boy David had played the harp before him.
I stopped and turned to Borila. “I’ve something very important to say to you,” I told him.
“Please speak,” he said.“If you look through that curtain you can see someone is asleep in the next room. It’s my wife, Sabina. Her parents, her sisters, and her twelve-year old brother have been killed with the rest of the family. You told me that you had killed hundreds of Jews near Golta, and that is where they were taken.” Looking into his eyes, I added, “You yourself don’t know who you have shot, so we can assume that you are the murderer of her family.”
He jumped up, his eyes blazing, looking as if he were about to strangle me.
I held up my hand and said, “Now -let’s try an experiment. I shall wake my wife and tell her who you are, and what you have done. I can tell you what will happen. My wife will not speak one word of reproach! She’ll embrace you as if you were her brother. She’ll bring you supper, the best things she has in the house.”
“Now if Sabina who is a sinner like all, can forgive and love like this, imagine how Jesus, who is perfect Love, can forgive and love you! Only return to Him-and everything you have done will be forgiven!”
Borila was not heartless: within, he was consumed by guilt and misery at what he had done, and he had shaken his brutal talk at us as a crab its claws. One tap at his weak spot, and his defenses crumbled. The music had already moved his heart, and now came-instead of the attack he expected-words of forgiveness. His reaction was amazing. He jumped up and tore at his collar with both hands, so that his shirt was rent apart. “Oh God, what shall I do, what shall I do?” He cried. He put his head in his hands, and sobbed noisily as he rocked himself back and forth. “I’m a murderer, I’m cloaked in blood, what shall I do?” Tears ran down his cheeks.
I cried “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I command the devil of hatred to go out of your soul!”
Borila fell on his knees trembling, and we began to pray aloud. He knew no prayers; he simply asked again and again for forgiveness and said that he hoped and knew it would be granted. We were on our knees together for some time; then we stood up and embraced each other, and I said, “I promised to make an experiment. I shall keep my word.”
I went into the other room and found my wife still sleeping calmly. She was very weak and exhausted at that time. I woke her gently and said, “There is a man here whom you must meet. We believe he has murdered your family, but he has repented, and now he is our brother.”
She came out in her dressing gown and put out her arms to embrace him: then both began to weep and to kiss each other again and again. I have never seen a bride and bridegroom kiss with such love and passion and purity as this murderer and the survivor among his victims. Then, as I foretold, Sabina went to the kitchen to bring him food.
While she was away the thought came to me that Borila’s crime had been so terrible that some further lesson was needed. I went to the next room and returned with my son, Mihai, who was then two, asleep in my arms. It was only a few hours since Borila had boasted to us how he had killed Jewish children in their parents arms, and now he was horrified; the sight was an unbearable reproach. He expected me to accuse him.But I said, “Do you see how quietly he sleeps? You are also like a newborn child who can rest in the Father’s arms. The blood that Jesus shed can cleanse you.”
Borila’s happiness was very moving: he stayed with us that night and when he awoke the next day, he said, “It’s a long time since I slept like that.”
St. Augustine says, “Anima humana naturaliter Christiana est“–the human soul is naturally Christian. Crime is against one’s own nature, the result of social pressure or many other causes, and what a relief it is to cast it off as he had done!
In the morning Borila wanted to meet our Jewish friends and I took him to many Hebrew Christian homes. Everywhere he told his story, and he was received as the returning prodigal son. Then, with a New Testament which I gave him, he went to join his Regiment in another town.
Borila later came to say that his unit has been ordered to the front. “What shall I do? He asked. “I’ll have to start killing again.”I said, “No, you’ve killed more than a soldier needs to already. I don’t mean that a Christian shouldn’t defend his country if it is attacked. But you, personally, shouldn’t kill anymore-better allow others to kill you. The bible doesn’t forbid that!”…
[later] Greigore explained how he had served with Borila in Transmistria, where they had massacred the Jews. “When we went to Russia again, he was a changed man,” he said. “We couldn’t understand it. He put aside his weapons and instead of taking lives, he saved them. He volunteered to rescue the wounded under fire, and in the end he saved his officer.”
excerpt from In God’s Underground by Richard Wurmbrand
By Richard Wurmbrand
Copyright 1968 The voice of the Martyrs
C. S.Lewis—Heaven
We are very shy nowadays of even mentioning heaven. We are afraid of the jeer about ‘pie in the sky’, and of being told that we are trying to ‘escape’ from the duty of making a happy world here and now into dreams of a happy world elsewhere. But either there is ‘pie in the sky’ or there is not. If there is not, then Christianity is false, for this doctrine is woven into it’s whole fabric. If there is, then this truth, like any other, must be faced, whether it is useful at political meetings or no. Again, we are afraid that heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only…
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Hell–from The Problem of Pain, by C.S. Lewis
I am not going to try to prove the doctrine tolerable. Let us make no mistake; it is not tolerable. But I think the doctrine can be shown to be moral, by a critique of the objections ordinarily made, or felt, against it.
C.S. Lewis
First, there is an objection, in many minds, to the idea of retributive punishment as such. This has been partly dealt with in a previous chapter. It was there maintained that all punishment became unjust if the ideas of ill-desert and retribution were removed from it; and a core of righteousness was discovered within the vindictive passion its self, in the demand that the evil man must not be left perfectly satisfied with his own evil, that it must be made to appear to him what it rightly appears to others—evil. I said that Pain plants the flag of truth within a rebel fortress. We were then discussing pain which might still lead to repentance. How if it does not—if no further conquest than the planting of the flag ever takes place?
Let us try to be honest with ourselves. Picture to yourself a man who has risen to wealth or power by a continued course of treachery and cruelty, by exploiting for purely selfish ends the noble motions of his victims, laughing the while at their simplicity; who, having thus attained success, uses it for the gratification of lust and hatred and finally parts with the last rag of honour among thieves by betraying his own accomplices and jeering at their last moments of bewildered disillusionment. Suppose, further, that he does all this, not (as we like to imagine) tormented by remorse or even misgiving, but eating like a schoolboy and sleeping like a healthy infant—a jolly, ruddy-cheeked man, without a care in the world, unshakably confident to the very end that he alone has found the answer to the riddle of life, that God and man are fools whom he has got the better of, that his way of life is utterly successful, satisfactory, unassailable. We must be careful at this point. The least indulgence of the passion for revenge is very deadly sin. Christian charity counsels us to make every effort for the conversion of such a man: to prefer his conversion, at the peril of our own lives, perhaps of our own souls, to his punishment; to prefer it infinitely.
But that is not the question. Supposing he will not be converted, what destiny in the eternal world can you regard as proper for him? Can you really desire that such a man, remaining what he is (and he must be able to do that if he has free will) should be confirmed forever in his present happiness—should continue, for all eternity, to be perfectly convinced that the laugh is on his side? And if you cannot regard this as tolerable, is it only your wickedness—only spite—that prevents you from doing so? Or do you find that conflict between Justice and Mercy, which has sometimes seemed to you such an outmoded piece of theology, now actually at work in your own mind, and feeling very much as if it came to you from above, not from below? You are moved not by a desire for the wretched creature’s pain as such, but by a truly ethical demand that, soon or late, the right should be asserted, the flag planted in this horribly rebellious soul, even if no fuller and better conquest is to follow. In a sense, it is better for the creature its self, even if it never becomes good, that it should know its self a failure, a mistake. Even mercy can hardly wish to such a man his eternal, contented continuance in such ghastly illusion. Thomas Aquinas said of suffering, as Aristotle had said of shame, that it was a thing not good in its self; but a thing which might have a certain goodness in particular circumstances. That is to say, if evil is present, pain at recognition of the evil, being a kind of knowledge, is relatively good; for the alternative is that the soul should be ignorant of the evil, or ignorant that the evil is contrary to its nature, ‘either of which’, says the philosopher, ‘is manifestly bad’.* And I think, though we tremble, we agree.
The demand that God should forgive such a man while he remains what he is, is based on a confusion between condoning and forgiving. To condone an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it were good. But forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete: and a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.
I have begun with the conception of Hell as a positive retributive punishment inflicted by God because that is the form in which the doctrine is most repellent, and I wished to tackle the strongest objection. But, of course, though Our Lord often speaks of Hell as a sentence inflicted by a tribunal, He also says elsewhere that the judgement consists in the very fact that men prefer darkness to light, and that not He, but His ‘word’, judges men** We are therefore at liberty—since the two conceptions, in the long run, mean the same thing—to think of this bad man’s perdition not as a sentence imposed on him but as the mere fact of being what he is. The characteristic of lost souls is ‘their rejection of everything that is not simply themselves’.*** Our imaginary egoist has tried to turn everything he meets into a province or appendage of the self. The taste for the other, that is, the very capacity for enjoying good, is quenched in him except in so far as his body still draws him into some rudimentary contact with an outer world. Death removes this last contact. He has his wish—to lie wholly in the self and to make the best of what he finds there. And what he finds there is Hell.
1 Summa Theol, I, IIae, Q. xxxix, Art. 1.
** John 3:19; 12:48.
*** See von Hügel, Essays and Addresses, 1st series, What do we mean by Heaven and Hell?
Lewis, C. S. (2009-05-28). The Problem of Pain (p.123- 125). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
St. John One: One 